I just realized that we never really talked about what those things really mean – such as how much traffic will take 1 gb of bandwidth, and where to see it.

First of all, you dont need to understand any of this. I sure dont, but since I want you to know how good Hostgator is, we’ll venture into this topic.

Bandwidth goes right along your average daily traffic. Every piece of information on your site is stored somewhere, and everytime somebody visits your site, that information is retrieved and loaded into that visitor’s browser.

The traffic between the servers and the visitor’s browser is what determines your bandwidth usage. The volume of transfer can increase your decrease depending not only on your traffic, but on the content of your page.

For example, if you have a JPEG picture of about 50kb, plus a small FLash animation of 600kb, the bandwidth it will take to load your site will be bigger than the one necessary to load a site with just plain text.

How does bandwidth influence your site’s performance?

CNN’s homepage is about 200kb. That means everytime a single visitor comes in, 200kb of bandwidth is used to load the page - since they get well over 500,000 visits/day, they require a minimum of 100GB of bandwidth for their homepage alone.